


quantocius

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: During Canon, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 07:59:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three times something almost happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	quantocius

Okay, in Artemis’s defense, hitting Wally in the face was completely an accident, and was also completely his own fault. 

"If I need to get reconstructive surgery, Artemis, you are  _sooo_  paying for it,” Wally whines presently, prodding tenderly at the bridge of his freckled nose and grimacing dramatically. 

"It was a reflex!" Artemis argues back, a little too loudly, her face contorted into a glare that’s entirely unnecessary. "I’m – I’m  _sensitive_  there.” 

"You mean ticklish," Wally deadpans back. (Artemis silently gives him credit for not pervertedly misconstruing her statement.) 

"No, I mean sensitive," Artemis retorts, folding her arms tightly. And she  _does_. Because do you know what ticklish means? It means giving Wally a Make-Fun-of-Artemis-Free card, and she only has about two of those in her arsenal, and they’re reserved for every human being on the planet that isn’t Wally. “Don’t you  _dare_  go tattling on Kaldur; you brought this upon yourself.”

"Jeez, I was just trying to get a soda!" Wally whines.

"Then you should’ve told me to move!" Artemis barks back. "Instead of sticking your arm right by my face!"

"It wasn’t your face; it was the back of your head! I didn’t think you were even gonna notice," Wally defends, the last bit descending into a petulant mumble. "Used super-speed and everything…" 

Another leftover chill races down Artemis’s spine from the now annoyingly electrified spot at the nape of her neck, and she physically reels in a shiver, biting down on her tongue. A bolt of it rattles down her spine and all the way to her toes. Her heart won’t stop hammering, and she’s telling herself that it’s just defensive adrenaline. 

Wally smells like pancakes. She knows this because, even though she had punched him square in the face after he had  _tickled her_ , the bastard, he hasn’t moved away from his spot against the refrigerator door that she’d been holding open a moment ago, and if she moves the wrong way, her chest will graze his. And that’s the  _last_  thing she needs on her fourth week on the Team – grazing chests with Kid Flash.

It feels weird to call him that. He’s not cool enough for it. Yeah, that’s it.

"So get your stupid soda, then, you freaking creeper," she grumbles.

Wally’s nostrils flare and he pulls a snobbish face, like he’s only doing what she says because he _wants_  to, and not because he’s actually obeying her. Before she can actually move aside, he leans into the fridge, his back rattling the jars of M’gann’s homemade jam on the door shelves, and Artemis stiffens – the angle has brought them significantly closer together, and her feet are refusing to put some distance between her and Wally’s stomach, which is now brushing against hers. He bends slightly down to rummage around on the second shelf. 

Her eyes shoot down to the waistline of his jeans, to the sliver of exposed skin from his presently raised shirt. He has freckles down there, too. Uh, noted. 

"Could you get out of my way, ple—" he starts to order her, turning his head back to properly glare at her, but the sentence dies in his throat when he notices that his nose has barely avoided the dip of her collarbone. His Adam’s apple bobs and Artemis’s stomach heats up and twists, and she feels him breathe out shakily – that tickles, too. 

She leaps back. 

"Conner drank the last Coke," she says loudly, a little squeakily. "But I think we have root beer!"

She manages to fumble her way backwards, and his expression hasn’t changed – his eyes are still wide and his cheeks are still a furious red and he’s still gawking at her with horror.

"Uh, bye," she finishes off, stilted. "A-Also, you suck. Yeah."

Good. That’ll show him.  

* * *

She always notices stuff like this at the worst possible times. Like in the middle of the night when they’re all on an overnight mission in the snowy mountains of Vlatava. 

Wally kicks a lot in his sleep, she’s starting to notice. They’ve been trading off on lookout since the sun had gone down, pointedly speaking as little as possible, only brushing fingers to pass each other heat packs.

She almost wishes that they weren’t on barely-civil terms since that whole lying-to-the-Team-and-betraying-his-trust debacle had gone down, so she could come up with some flimsy excuse curl up against that warmth-generating speedster body of his, but whatever; his choice, not hers. 

He mutters nonsense pretty frequently too, his face twitching and his hands jerking and his feet jolting intermittently as though preparing to bolt. Artemis curls around the heat pack she currently has pressed against her belly, closing her fur hood more tightly around her face and gazing, half-lidded and sleepy, at Wally’s dozing form. 

Her eyes drift and land on something she hadn’t expected, and for some reason, it makes her breath hitch in her raw throat. Wally has a light freckle in the left corner of his bottom lip.

This kind of awakens her attention to various other details: said lips are pink from the cold, chapped at the bottom and raw red in the spots where he’s peeled away the cracking skin too early. A scabbed-over cut from the butt of Captain Cold’s ice pistol juts up from the right, deep scarlet and vivid. He frowns in his sleep and his teeth slip out to suck his lower lip between them, and it’s swollen and more crimson when it comes out, shiny from moisture and wear. 

Artemis lifts one fingerless-gloved hand and barely swipes her thumb over his mouth, her skin jumping at how soft it is despite the obvious abuse it’s undergone. The movement parts his lips just slightly, and a snowflake catches in the open corner. And oh, boy, she really should not be doing this. She really should not be vividly picturing what it would be like to wake him up by covering his mouth with hers, raking her teeth over him until he bleeds and whispers her name raggedly through his shivers. 

Some of his stubble grazes her knuckle, and his breath splashes onto the side of her hand, spreading a brief wave of heat over her numb skin. One of her fingernails snags on a cold-swelled edge, and Wally mumbles hazily, shifting.

Artemis’s hand has darted away before his eyelids even flicker. She forces herself back around to scan the snowy mountains around them for the enemies she knows will be coming sooner or later. Wally doesn’t say her name in his sleep or reach over to touch her – he just makes a quiet moaning noise and falls quiet, and Artemis clenches her hands into fists and gnaws the inside of her cheek and breathes, in and out, through her nose, trying to convince herself that he’d taste like nothing at all. 

* * *

"Are you okay?" he asks her, and it’s the most standard and ostensibly innocuous question she’s ever heard come out of him, but there’s something in the tautness of his voice and the deliberate focus of his hardened eyes that gives it an entirely new weight. She can hear rain rattling against the sides of the mountain, and her hand, poised over the zeta tube number pad, won’t stop trembling. 

"F-Fine," she stammers back, the flimsiest excuse for a lie, even by her standards, and the way his throat bobs with an actually audible gulp alerts her to the fact that he’s seen right through it. 

She breathes in sharply through her nose to hold down the bile burbling up the back of her throat. It feels like it’s eating through her from the inside-out. She can still taste snow and fear on her lips; her temples are still echoing with the knee-buckling sounds of what she thinks might be some frightening imitation of his voice, roaring her name into the winter. 

His arms tense up like he’s fighting to keep them from doing something, and his cast creaks just slightly with the strain of his muscles. His cheeks are glistening with two fresh streaks of something she doesn’t want to dwell on. He wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve, sending a loud sniffle out to break the silence. 

Artemis is definitely going to throw up. Her eyes search frantically for some sort of receptacle,  _something_ , before finally falling on the glint of Wally’s empty popcorn bowl in the living room down the hall. She sprints for it, ignoring the cry of her name, and fumbles it off of the coffee table, crumpling to her knees on the floor and doubling over and retching into it, shaking uncontrollably, wheezing out sobs. Everything in her immediate memory is darkness and fire and haste, feeling like each of her limbs was slowly being chopped off in anachronic order – her elbow, M’gann; her ankle, Dick; her hand, Kaldur; her toes, Conner; both of her legs, Wally – and she spasms just a little harder when she feels a warm palm on her back, when she hears the confused but steady murmurs of empty comfort from a voice that won’t stop making her bones twinge.

She gasps when she’s done, gulping down air and dripping snot and tears into the bowl, swallowing stiffly to keep from gagging any further. Wally’s fingers curl into the leather of her jacket and grip it. 

She heaves her head up and turns, and her eyes rivet onto his without a moment’s errant wandering. Their verdant shade is more muted now in the sparse light from the dimmed overhead lamps, and his nose is running, too, and his cheeks are red and his lower lip is quivering. He looks about as lost and terrified as she feels from the heels up. 

"Don’t ever," he croaks, "Ever do that again."

"What," she rasps back. "Barf?"

Their eyes stay on each other’s, hardly even twitching, and Artemis’s breathing rhythm starts to return to normal again, even though her stomach is still squirming and her throat is still ablaze. Wally lifts his hand away from her shoulders and, shakily, unsurely, tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear. The pads of his fingers skim her earlobe, and Artemis wants nothing more in that exact heated instant than to drop her forehead against his collarbone and cry, but she doesn’t. She has a feeling she’ll never get up the guts to touch him the way he sometimes touches her, when they’re too scared to bother feigning apathy. 

This should be the part where they touch foreheads, where he holds her, where she scrabbles a hug onto him and wraps herself around him limb-by-limb and doesn’t release him for days. But it isn’t. 

"You know what I mean," he tells her, his face screwing up in pain, his eyes leaking unattractively.

The next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, he doesn’t look at her at all. She waits for Black Canary to inevitably gather them around for a prayer circle and, little by little, manages to make herself think that she really doesn’t care and never will.  


End file.
